Post-Update Maintenance

This skill changes things. Install deliberately.

It pairs with post-update-awareness — that skill reads release notes and notices broken state; this one fixes it. The split is intentional: awareness is safe to install and run on every heartbeat, maintenance is invoked when you actually want mutations.

When to use

Run this skill when any of the following is true:

1. post-update-awareness surfaced drifted plugins or stale config entries and the user wants them resolved.
2. The user says some variant of "fix what awareness flagged" / "sync the drifted plugins" / "clean up the stale config".
3. A safe-update wrapper script is orchestrating a controlled update window and needs the mutation steps.

Do not run this skill from a heartbeat. It belongs in an attended session or an explicitly scheduled maintenance job, never as ambient background work.

Scope

This skill does:

• Sync externalized npm-installed plugins that drifted behind the gateway version (openclaw plugins update )
• Restart the gateway and wait for Runtime: running
• Snapshot channel health before and after, report any newly-broken channels
• Print a JSON patch that removes stale entries from openclaw.json (and apply it only on explicit confirmation)
• Back up openclaw.json before any mutation; if post-restart gateway is unhealthy, restore the backup

This skill does not:

• Read or distill CHANGELOG content (that's post-update-awareness)
• Install missing native dependencies (sharp, ffmpeg, node-pty) — those need package-manager context this skill shouldn't have
• Roll back OpenClaw to a previous version (that's your update-guard, e.g. openclaw-update-guard.sh)
• Modify any plugin config keys beyond removing stale top-level plugins.entries. entries flagged by the gateway as "disabled but configured"
• Run unattended

Dependency: post-update-awareness

This skill requires post-update-awareness >= 0.3.1 to be installed. It reuses two scripts from that skill:

• scripts/resolve.sh — locates the awareness install across known layouts
• scripts/check-plugin-drift.sh — the authoritative drift detector

If awareness is not installed, the skill exits with a clear error pointing the user at clawhub install post-update-awareness. The two skills are versioned independently — pin a compatible awareness version in _meta.json if you find a regression.

Why the hard dep instead of vendoring: vendoring the drift detector in two skills would re-create exactly the drift problem this whole pair exists to solve. One source of truth.

Workflow

1) Pre-flight

{baseDir}/scripts/preflight.sh <profile>

The script:

• Confirms post-update-awareness is installed (via its resolve.sh)
• Confirms gateway is healthy before the maintenance run (refuses to start if not — that's the update-guard's job, not this skill's)
• Confirms openclaw.json is readable and writable
• Computes a SHA256 of the current config and stashes a timestamped backup at ${OPENCLAW_PROFILE_DIR}/post-update-maintenance/backups/openclaw.json.
• Snapshots channels status JSON to ${OPENCLAW_PROFILE_DIR}/post-update-maintenance/snapshots/channels-before..json

If any check fails, the script prints BLOCKED on stdout and exits 2. The skill must stop here and surface the reason to the user. Do not attempt to repair pre-flight failures — that's outside scope.

2) Detect drift (read-only, via awareness)

{baseDir}/scripts/detect-drift.sh <profile>

Internally this calls scripts/check-plugin-drift.sh from post-update-awareness via the resolver. Output is the same DRIFT (gateway ) lines, one per drifted plugin.

If output is empty → skip to step 4 (config cleanup may still have work to do).

3) Sync drifted plugins (mutation — gated)

{baseDir}/scripts/sync-drifted-plugins.sh <profile> [--apply] [--yes]

Default mode is dry-run. Without --apply, the script prints the exact openclaw plugins update commands it would run, one per line, and exits 0. Nothing changes.

With --apply, the script:

1. For each drifted plugin: runs openclaw --profile plugins update (sequential, not parallel — plugin updates can rewrite openclaw.json).
2. After all syncs: runs openclaw --profile gateway restart.
3. Polls gateway status for up to 60 seconds waiting for Runtime: running.
4. If healthy → proceed.
5. If unhealthy → restore the config backup from step 1, restart again, exit 3 with RESTORE .

--yes skips the per-plugin confirmation prompt when running attended. Without --yes, the skill should prompt the user before each plugin (good practice when one of the drifted plugins is a sensitive transport like @openclaw/whatsapp).

Plugin updates often rewrite openclaw.json and log lines like:

Config overwrite: <path> (sha256 <old> -> <new>, backup=<path>.bak)

The script captures these and includes them in the run report. The user-facing summary should mention every config rewrite and where the .bak lives, even on success — this is information they need.

4) Detect stale config entries (read-only)

{baseDir}/scripts/detect-stale-config.sh <profile>

Parses openclaw --profile gateway status (and plugins list) for lines like:

plugins.entries.<id>: plugin disabled (...) but config is present

Output: one stale entry per line, in the form:

STALE plugins.entries.<id>

These entries are safe to remove but the gateway leaves them in place because removing config the user wrote is risky without explicit consent.

5) Clean stale config entries (mutation — gated)

{baseDir}/scripts/clean-stale-config.sh <profile> [--apply] [--entries <id1,id2,...>]

Default mode is dry-run. Without --apply:

• Prints the JSON patch that would be applied (in RFC 6902 style: one { "op": "remove", "path": "/plugins/entries/" } per stale entry)
• Lists the file paths that would change
• Exits 0

With --apply:

1. Re-reads openclaw.json (defensive — config may have changed since pre-flight if step 3 ran)
2. Computes a fresh SHA256 backup at ${OPENCLAW_PROFILE_DIR}/post-update-maintenance/backups/openclaw.json.
3. Applies the patch using jq (or a Python fallback) — atomic write via .tmp + mv
4. Asks the gateway to reload config: openclaw --profile gateway restart
5. Polls for healthy
6. If unhealthy → restore the backup, restart, exit 3 with RESTORE

--entries lets the user opt into a subset rather than all detected stale entries. Useful when one of the entries is something they intend to re-enable later.

6) Channel health verification (read-only)

{baseDir}/scripts/verify-channels.sh <profile>

Snapshots channels status JSON, diffs against the pre-flight snapshot. Output:

• OK_HEALTHY — was healthy, still healthy
• RECOVERED — was unhealthy before, now healthy (good news to surface)
• BROKE — was healthy before, now unhealthy (bad news; surface loudly)
• STILL_BROKEN — was unhealthy before, still unhealthy (mention, but don't blame this skill)

The pre-flight + post-mutation pairing matters: a channel that was already disconnected before the maintenance run isn't a regression caused by this skill, and the report should distinguish.

7) Surface the result

Send one brief message via the active channel.

Maintenance complete on profile <profile>.

✅ Synced: @openclaw/whatsapp 2026.5.3 → 2026.5.5
✅ Cleaned 2 stale config entries (plugins.entries.device-pair, plugins.entries.cognee-openclaw)
✅ Gateway restarted, runtime healthy

Channels:
- WhatsApp default: healthy (unchanged)
- Telegram default: healthy (unchanged)

Backups: ${OPENCLAW_PROFILE_DIR}/post-update-maintenance/backups/
Logs:    ${OPENCLAW_PROFILE_DIR}/post-update-maintenance/runs/<epoch>.log

If anything restored:

⚠️ Maintenance rolled back on profile <profile>.

Attempted: sync @openclaw/whatsapp 2026.5.3 → 2026.5.5
Result: gateway unhealthy after restart — restored openclaw.json from backup.
Restored config: ${OPENCLAW_PROFILE_DIR}/post-update-maintenance/backups/openclaw.json.<epoch>
Restart log: ${OPENCLAW_PROFILE_DIR}/post-update-maintenance/runs/<epoch>.log

Recommend investigating before retrying. The gateway is now running the previous config.

Hard cap: ~18 lines, same as awareness. Drop empty sections.

8) Persist run state

Write a JSON run record to ${OPENCLAW_PROFILE_DIR}/post-update-maintenance/runs/.json containing:

• The profile
• The pre-flight config SHA256 and backup path
• Each drifted plugin attempted and its outcome
• Each stale entry attempted and its outcome
• Pre/post channel health diff
• The final gateway runtime status
• Restore status if any

This run history lets the user (or a future agent) audit what happened without re-running anything.

Path conventions

All state lives under ${OPENCLAW_PROFILE_DIR}/post-update-maintenance/, resolved in the same order as post-update-awareness:

1. $OPENCLAW_PROFILE_DIR/post-update-maintenance/
2. $HOME/.openclaw-/post-update-maintenance/
3. $HOME/.openclaw/post-update-maintenance/

Subdirectories:

• backups/ — openclaw.json. snapshots taken before every mutation
• snapshots/ — channels-before..json and channels-after..json
• runs/ — .json run record + .log raw command output

Old backups and run logs older than 30 days are not auto-pruned. The skill is not allowed to delete anything in ${OPENCLAW_PROFILE_DIR} — that's the user's data.

Safety contract

This skill respects the following invariants:

1. Default is dry-run. Every mutating script requires --apply to actually change anything.
2. Every mutation has a backup. Config snapshots taken immediately before each mutation, never reused across steps.
3. Every mutation is reversible. Backup restore is the first response to post-mutation unhealth.
4. No silent failure. If anything fails, the skill exits non-zero with a clear RESTORE or BLOCKED line.
5. No version rollback. This skill never runs npm install -g openclaw@. Version-level recovery is the update-guard's job.
6. No native-dep install. Optional native modules (sharp, ffmpeg, node-pty) are out of scope. The skill assumes the host package manager has them or doesn't.
7. Read-only awareness fallback. When the drift detector reports no drift and the stale-config detector reports nothing to remove, the skill exits with NOTHING_TO_DO and doesn't restart the gateway.

Voice

Operational. Terse. Factual. Match the awareness skill's tone — this is not marketing.

• ✅ "Synced @openclaw/whatsapp 2026.5.3 → 2026.5.5. Gateway restarted, healthy. WhatsApp default reconnected after 14s."
• ❌ "🎉 Successfully completed maintenance with zero issues!"

Failure modes

Why this exists

post-update-awareness surfaces problems. Users were then expected to remember the exact commands to fix each one — and to remember to back up openclaw.json first, and to restart the gateway, and to check that channels didn't break. In practice they ran the wrong subset, or forgot the backup, or didn't notice when WhatsApp came back as not-linked.

This skill is the small, deliberate, gated mutation layer that closes that loop. It's separate from awareness so the trust posture is clear: awareness is safe to install everywhere, maintenance is invoked when you want changes.